On Mars
Of course, we had trouble at first. The atmosphere was thinner than we’d predicted; for weeks we gasped and fainted in our suits. Our cultivation projects didn’t take — the tomatoes died, then the bell peppers, then the hogs. We found ourselves living on orange algae and CO2 inside of a month.
But what really surprised us was how quickly we adjusted. Tastes went first — by Easter, nobody could remember lamb. We gave up on holidays pretty quick after that, then months and days of the week. We were marking time by the two moons when we discovered we’d lost birdsong. Maybe if we’d mourned we would have been able to hold on a little longer, but we all thought it was important to keep our chins up. We built dome houses, tested soil. Alexandra gave birth to a baby girl. It was when we tried to teach her about home that we realized that Earth was gone from our minds — that cornfield, meadow, mountain stream were all just words, and the red rocks were all we had ever known.